Cameron Stewart

Otto & Olya Pages 6-8 Commentary

Added 2025-05-13 14:19:26 +0000 UTC

Less page-specific breakdowns this time and some general notes on the scene.

I always wanted to start with Olya having some kind of hallucination out on the dancefloor. The original pages depicted her having some sort of cosmic vision:

The problem with this is that most people who I showed it to jumped to the immediate assumption: “Oh, she’s on drugs.” Is this a fair assumption, given the Berlin club scene that inspired it? Sure, but it’s not what I was hoping to communicate at all. My intention was that with the lights and music and exertion she was opening herself up to having some kind of communion with something outside of physical space and time.

(Hmm, that does sound like she’s on drugs.)

I decided that it needed to be something less cosmic and also something that would be related to the story, like she was having a surreal premonition. I redesigned the sequence to give her the vision of the snapping, violent scissors.

As usual some of the panels went through a bunch of iterations before I settled on the right one (videos in accompanying post).

Pencils: